If you had your heart set on rampaging through the abandoned streets of New York Mad Max–style in The Division, I’ve got some bad news for you.

During a recent interview with design director Axel Rydby and lead game designer Mathias Karlson, fansite The Division France asked whether or not players could expect to drive vehicles in the game. Their answer, while not an outright denial, still feels like a fairly conclusive no.

“If society fell and suddenly you had to go out and hunt for food and water, you can’t go down to your local supermarket and buy whatever you want, you have to actually start conserving it and you have to start thinking about how you’re spending those valuable resources that you have.” Rydby said. “If you had access to fuel, would you use it to make sure that you have access to clean water or make sure that you had access to food—being able to heat your food—maybe have a mobile generator that you can fuel so you can have electricity, or would you use it to fuel your car? I know what I would do.”

In other words, those pretty next-gen cars are for cover, not joyrides.

Karlson followed up with a vague but equally telling answer of his own. “The way you navigate and move through a city or a game that is open in nature is very core to how you experience the world,” he explained. “We’re currently investigating what’s the best for our game, what will give you the best experience as a player, because that’s, in the end, what’s important to us.”

Couple these responses with the fact that none of environments we’ve seen thus far seem particularly automobile friendly, and it’s practically a given that most—if not all—of your time in post-pandemic NYC will be spent pounding the pavement the old fashioned way.

If you’re eager for some other minor tidbits, the rest of the interview is definitely worth a watch, though most it’s basically reiterating the same details we’ve known since E3.

The Division will be out on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC sometime in fall 2014.

About Josh Harmon

Josh picked up a controller when he was 3 years old—and he hasn’t looked back since. This has made him particularly vulnerable to attacks from behind. He joined EGM as an intern following a brief-but-storied career on a number of small gaming blogs across the Internet. Find him on Twitter @jorshy

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Don’t Expect to Do Much Driving in The Division

If you had your heart set on rampaging through the abandoned streets of New York Mad Max–style in The Division, I’ve got some bad news for you.

During a recent interview with design director Axel Rydby and lead game designer Mathias Karlson, fansite The Division France asked whether or not players could expect to drive vehicles in the game. Their answer, while not an outright denial, still feels like a fairly conclusive no.

“If society fell and suddenly you had to go out and hunt for food and water, you can’t go down to your local supermarket and buy whatever you want, you have to actually start conserving it and you have to start thinking about how you’re spending those valuable resources that you have.” Rydby said. “If you had access to fuel, would you use it to make sure that you have access to clean water or make sure that you had access to food—being able to heat your food—maybe have a mobile generator that you can fuel so you can have electricity, or would you use it to fuel your car? I know what I would do.”

In other words, those pretty next-gen cars are for cover, not joyrides.

Karlson followed up with a vague but equally telling answer of his own. “The way you navigate and move through a city or a game that is open in nature is very core to how you experience the world,” he explained. “We’re currently investigating what’s the best for our game, what will give you the best experience as a player, because that’s, in the end, what’s important to us.”

Couple these responses with the fact that none of environments we’ve seen thus far seem particularly automobile friendly, and it’s practically a given that most—if not all—of your time in post-pandemic NYC will be spent pounding the pavement the old fashioned way.

If you’re eager for some other minor tidbits, the rest of the interview is definitely worth a watch, though most it’s basically reiterating the same details we’ve known since E3.

The Division will be out on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC sometime in fall 2014.

About Josh Harmon

Josh picked up a controller when he was 3 years old—and he hasn’t looked back since. This has made him particularly vulnerable to attacks from behind. He joined EGM as an intern following a brief-but-storied career on a number of small gaming blogs across the Internet. Find him on Twitter @jorshy